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A1. 8MB is worth the extra few bucks. Its pretty much a no brainer.
A2. RPMs wise get a 7200 one its got good seek times and its not too loud.
10K is great, but it has more noise and better seek times. 5400 is mostly for storage that you dont access too often. Or good thing for a seti cruncher.
A3. SATA 150 is just as fast as ata133. Or the advantage is too small to notice. But if you have SATA mobo and dont mind spending the extra few bucks, get a sata drive. maybe a 10K RPM one.
A4. Lower seek times will improve performance of a system. Why do you think servers have 15K RPM SCSI drives? It all helps, BUT its not cheap. 8ms is pretty good. 10ms, well its mostly on the lower RPM drives.

Most likely if youre looking at a drive, you must consider that 5400RPM one will be quiet but it will have longer seek times compared to 7200RPM drive.
But I think that most of them will have 8mb buffer (bigger ones at least)

thoric! telepathy? esp? i dunno but you answered a question when it was still in my head!

"mmm are those western digital jobbies up to snuff or are they cheap imposters?"

thanks for the tip bloke, appreciate it. ; ]

:afro:

oh yeah, btw, what about those incredible sub 5 ms seek times? impressive numbers but how much would you notice it in a gaming environment? at startup/gameload i guess but thereafter would it not become an obsolete consideration due to RAM?
just wondered, ty.

whilst I have been soaking up the knowledge you blokes have kindly shared someone here has donated a H/D which i think will tide me over for a bit (until the next gen athlon64 etc. major upgrade even!), its an IBM DTLA 307030 in perfect nick. From some hasty research it seems it was top drawer when it hit the market back in 2000/1 - sweet!

it certainly pwnz my maxtor 10gb according to sandra;-

C: maxtor st310212a = 10929 kb/sec

E: IBM dtla 307030 = 20050 kb/sec

one odd thing i noticed, according to the internet st310212a is a seagate H/D ?